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Friday, July 29, 2016

At this blog (Memoirous--about memories) I’ve mentioned in
the past certain blogs or websites that can help to spark flashes. Right now
I’m onto Forgotten Chicago and Abandoned Spaces. I signed up for notifications
so whenever there is a new post it shows up in my feed. Which is all Facebook
gobbely-gook. What I mean to say is I love the pictures and they motivate me to
flash and write about memories.

Abandoned Spaces viscerally calls up nostalgic curiosity. I
am always intrigued by the various spaces, once inhabited but now abandoned and
the various relics left behind.

Sometimes it is a shoe store still warehousing
and displaying styles from the 60s, sometimes it is a schoolroom from Chernobyl
with decaying textbooks fertilizing a tree growing up between broken desks. Who
isn’t fascinated by ruins? They call to us, remind us that we are all mortal,
that nothing stays the same, but will eventually breakdown, go back to nature.
Even notions of religion—how many hollowed out churches and abbeys are there?
In Turkey we toured grottos and underground Christian churches that are now
archaic, in Rome we visited huge basilicas built upon the foundation of pagan
temples, what was in suddenly becomes passé. Or, in the true style of history,
wait long enough and the pendulum swings back; it is cyclical.

Nevertheless, we are drawn to these spaces. Here in the US
Detroit is now a major tourist stop for people who are curious about modern-day
ruins. Friends of mine travel to Gary, IN to break into abandoned buildings,
business sites to explore and take pictures.

Looking at these pictures stirs something up inside of me,
causes me to think long and hard about what was, what might be, and who we
could become.

Forgotten Chicago is truly a Facebook community. There is
nothing like throwing up an old pic of Chicago to arouse comments and an
outpouring of memories. Just the other day a pic of the old Morrie Mages sports
store was posted even I waxed nostalgic, it was like 8 floors of sporting
goods! (One whole floor was dedicated to golfing equipment.) Morrie sold out to
Sportmart and then it became Sports Authority—a subpar store compared to Morrie
Mages.

From the amazing Internet:

``I`m not tired. I`m
not that old. I`m aggressive and alive, and I love this business,`` said the
71-year-old Mages. ``But in order to get bigger, you got to have more money
behind you, and I ain`t got it.``

The colorful Mages, dubbed ``Chicago`s
Mr. Sporting Goods,`` says, ``I`ve been thinking about selling for the last six
months--somebody must`ve read my mind,`` said Mages, who still handles all
buying and merchandising for the stores. Mages said he recently turned down offers from
Peoria-based Brown`s Sporting Goods and from Sportmart.Mages is one of few surviving Chicago
merchants who started his career on Maxwell Street, the city`s Old World-style
bazaar on the Near South Side, hawking bargains from a pushcart in front of his
Russian immigrant father`s sporting goods store. He became a partner in the
business with his father and brother in 1938.

There is also Calumet 412, and Uptown Chicago History
offering photos to riff on.

Bill MattesonTHE SILVER PALM BURLESQUE BARWell it was about 1948 on a Saturday afternoon,
I was 12 years old, me and my buddy Jimmy Thomas were going to the
DeLuxe Theatre at the corner of Wilson Ave and Clifton which is just west of
the El tracks,

Jimmy and I stopped in Front of the Silver Palm
to see if we could peekin and see something that would be worthwhile
for a 12 old boy to see.

Three Big black Sedans pulled up, men jumped out
of the cars carrying sledge hammers and axes . they smashed through the locked
front door, Jimmy and I, being Boys followed right in after
them.we stood on the side and watch them smash
tables, bottles, the bar and even the walls

and there on the walls were pictures of Nude
Women, we were in our glory. The smasher guys told us to stay out of
the way and we could have anything we wanted.We stole an old wagon from the outside back of the bar, took all the pictures and
behind the bar were some small cartons containing little plastic
telescopes on a key chain, inside the scopes were women nude from the waist
up.other boxes contained "8 pagers"

the outcome was me and jimmy took the wagon back
to the "Pretzel Benders Inn" on Leland Ave. just west of
Kenmore and sold everything we had to a few of the "boys"we made about $10 eachWe didn't really want to see Abbot and Costello
meet Captain Kidd any wayan 8 pager was exactly that, page 1 was the
cover then 7 other pages of hand drawn sex acts.the Deluxe Theater was razed and is now part of
the Truman Campus$10 was a huge amount of money for a 12 year
old. 12 cents got me into the movieRiverview had 2 cent day can you imagine 50
rides for a buck?Who were those guys in the Black Sedans? I never
found out, it never made the newspaperthe speculation in the neighborhood was
the"mob" or the IRS or "Big 10" from Townhall police
stationBig 10 was an unmarked squad car with three
detectives and nobody ever messed with Big ten

Write right now: pull out a box of old photos, write a
caption, begin a memory, call up your sister, brother, friend, write about the
day they took that picture, or what you recall of that place and what went on
there.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

You don’t realize how much of real life is squeezed into a
Disney animated film. Life, Animated
is a new documentary out by Roger Ross Williams about Owen Suskind a young man
with Autism obsessed with Disney animated classics. Throughout the film Suskind
and his father quotes lines from the movies that directly relate or are
pertinent to Owen’s life: the fears, the highs, the lows. Even Owen himself
sees parallels, how things always look worse before they get better, how the
bad guy is all part of the hero’s journey, the necessary role of the sidekick.
Owen’s life could be a Disney classic.

For someone who needs the help of social cues, these movies
become tools for Owen to navigate his life.

As a 3-year-old Owen suddenly lost speech and retreated into
a world of his own. A room without doors. His parents with the help of
therapists and teacher searched for inroads, but ran into roadblocks. UNTIL one
day, once upon a time, they discovered Owen repeating some lines from The Little Mermaid, appropriately the
scene where Ariel makes a bargain with the Sea Witch, her voice for human legs.
Who knew Disney was the cure! Could unravel the mystery inside Owen’s mind!

Stories such as Peter
Pan, afraid to grow up, and the coming-of-age story of Lion King, and Pinocchio
about becoming a “real” boy all feed into Owen’s own narrative. He’d stop and
rewind and live through certain scenes before embarking on some tough choices
or life benchmarks—such as moving out of the house, graduating high school:
stuff that send all of us through emotional hiccups.

Even the romantic parts of Aladdin and Snow White
pave the way for Owen to work through his first real boyfriend/girlfriend
relationship. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
is another example—his deformity of hunchback doesn’t go away, but he learns to
live with it and amongst the barbaric village people who don’t know how to
accept him. In fact reviewing the list of Disney films, with a few exceptions,
are mostly about accepting the outsider, how to be a friend.

Life, Animated is
truly inspiring, giving hope to individuals who struggle or work alongside of
those who struggle with Autism.

Monday, July 25, 2016

I can’t begin to name them all. Three of the bunch are
triplets. The majority were all born during the civil war. One was actually
born in a refugee camp. Her name is Haneen meaning nostalgia. A yearning for
yesteryear, for what they once had, for their homeland. They named her that so
they would not forget. Looking back, yet moving forward. Remembering the good
times, prayers for what lies ahead.

Friday, July 22, 2016

I was listening to an interview on Fresh Air with Garry Marshall (re-aired since he just passed) about
his career writing comedy and for TV and movies. He is best known for
developing and writing for Happy Days
among others. He said something interesting: time + pain=comedy. We’re always
looking for that elusive creative spark.

Sometimes it is simply butt in chair. Sitting down and
writing. Spending time with your material. This is not sexy advice. We always
wish for the “secret,” the inside scoop, the magic formula. But often it comes
with a prosaic thud. Live life, write about life. That’s it.

He said when looking for material he went back to an
embarrassing moment. As a boy he would never take off his shirt at the beach
because once his mother said you have so many moles. I bet I can connect the
dots. Thereafter he was self-conscious about his moles and freckles. Later he
would turn this into a famous episode on the Dick Van Dyke Show, the one where Rob falls asleep on the couch and
his son (Ritchie?) comes in and connects the dots with an ink pen. Laura
discovers that Rob’s freckles form a facsimile of the Liberty Bell. He ends up
appearing on “Reality” TV show, “Odd But True.”

This is exactly what I say in my flash memoir seminars: mine
memories from your own life. Riff on stuff from your childhood, and sometimes
the pain from the past becomes your most compelling material.

Let’s look at an example. A detail became the basis for a short
short 100-word flash. A woman slipping her cellphone into her bra. I took that
thought and crafted/flashed a piece called Granny’s
Pockets about someone who grew up referring to boobs as pockets because her
grandmother was constantly tucking things away down the front of her dress. I
wrote it, researched 100-word story journals, submitted the piece, had it
accepted, and ONLINE within a few hours. Really.

That was a record and gave me a real boost. (I boast.)

Right now write a flash based upon some fledgling memory
from your childhood, suppressed pain, the stuff of nightmares and turn it into
a narrative. Revisiting these memories might make for horror, comedy, or
slice-of-life- anecdotal flash. Give it a try.

Friday, July 15, 2016

I saw a call for submissions to an anthology called TheShell Game based upon borrowed forms. For example using the platform of a
recipe as a springboard into writing about something else. Just like last week
we experimented with the LIST memoir, you can use ready-made forms such as
directions to a restaurant to meander into a rant on how the date went.

From the webpage:

Within the recent
explosion of creative nonfiction, a curious new sub-genre is quietly emerging.
Hybrids in the truest sense, "hermit crab" essays borrow their
structures from ordinary, extra-literary sources (a recipe, a police report, a
pack of cards, an obituary…) to use as a framework for a lyric meditation on
the chosen subject. In the best examples, the borrowed structures are less
contrived than inevitable, managing not only to give shape to the work but to
illuminate and exemplify its subject.

Here’s one that spoke to me—remember in Ladies Home Journal
the column: Can this Marriage Be Saved? Even as a kid I read it. Here is an
interesting story from the Bellingham Review based upon this concept.

1. Which best describes your reasons for marrying him?
a. You have no idea. You were only twenty, too young to know what you were
doing.
b. You have no idea. You were twenty, old enough to know better.
c. This is what you’re trying to figure out. You weren’t in love with him. You
weren’t even attracted to him, even though he was a perfectly nice person,
clean and wiry, his prematurely receding hairline and thick brows and goofy
humor reminding you of a Muppet, sweet and cartoonish. You felt toward him a
fraternal affection.
d. You were trying to somehow fill the emptiness that came over you at dusk the
months after your first love disappeared.
e. Marriage seemed like a healthier refuge than drugs or drinking. You imagined
escaping into it, like going to sleep and waking up a new person.
f. Your husband-to-be cried the day he confessed to sleeping with an old
girlfriend. You were in bed with the flu, and you thought, oh, good. Now I
don’t have to. He’d brought you milkshakes and roses; he’d played endless
rounds of gin rummy. But now he was saying, “I’m so sorry.” You tried to shrug
off the blankets, turn the pillow for a cool spot, but the bedclothes were
weighed down by something: his head, burrowing into tousled sheets. That’s when
you realized he was crying, pinning covers against your feverish skin. “It’s
okay,” you said, patting his head.
g. You were saddened by his anguish, seeing in it your own anguish over your
first love, seeing in it all the world’s unfulfilled longings.
h. He begged you to marry him, and you thought: he’s a good person. Someone in
the world ought to get what he wants.
i. One evening you fell asleep while he was fondling your breasts, and you woke
to find him wearing your bra tied to his head like a bonnet. And you thought: I
could do worse than wake up every morning to someone who makes me laugh.
2. True or False: You sometimes feel like you don’t really exist.

Sometimes a recipe makes us remember—the people who handed
it down to us, where we were when we made it, all the picnics or special
suppers when we sat around a table and enjoyed the meal.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

I’ve been think a lot lately about early-onset Alzheimer’s. I think it has
to do with the recent death of Pat Summitt, former head coach of the Lady Vols
at the University of Tennessee. She was only 64.

There is another reason I am saddened by her death: My father loved the Lady
Vols. He watched every game he could on television.

After retiring my parents moved to a kind of “Stepford Wives” retirement
community where every lawn was groomed, the houses perfect, and the residents
(mostly white) golfed and drank martinis. Maybe it was a bit like Mad Men too,
with a dark underside. Anyway this community lay along the Cumberland Plateau
in Tennessee, so close to the basketball action for that state. On weekends
you’d see cars with little flags whipping on the back of SUVs Go Lady Vols. The
women were taken just as bit as seriously as the men.

And Pat Summitt was no joke, but the real deal. No one wanted to get between
her and victory. She coached the team to eight NCAA championships. So thinking
about Pat reminds me of my dad—and how surprised and pleased he might be that
she has joined him in some eternal basketball court. Surprised that she was
there already, but pleased to watch replays over and over again with her.

Since this blog is about memories, I also cannot help dwelling on the
incredible tragedy of early-onset Alzheimer’s. It seems such an ironic disease
to be visited upon someone with such potential. Truly a person of 59 or 60
should not be looking forward to a painful diminishing death—but to world
travel, long dinners at fancy restaurants. At this moment in life after kids
are grown and through college, and (fingers crossed) the house is paid for
there is suddenly some wiggle room, time for oneself, possibly to reap the
fruits of one’s labors.

Now life takes a sudden turn. Which is another reason I feel lucky to be
able to cycle and in about 7 weeks begin a bike trip of a lifetime—JOGLE, from
John O Groats to Land’s End.

A Marriage to Remember | Alzheimer's Disease Documentary | Op-Docs | The New York Times

Monday, July 11, 2016

Now July. Officially staring down 2 months before lift off.
In September I will embark on a 1,000 mile journey from the top of England to
Land’s End in Cornwall.

This past week I tested out camping equipment on a car road trip--of 2
thousand miles. Chicago to Portland, Maine. It was both stressful and pleasant.
A lot like life. And a chance to test some of my armchair traveler theories.
You see, it's easy enough to plan a trip in front of a computer, but reality
has a way of throwing a wrench into the mix.

One: relying on phone and Google maps. One of my biggest worries is
navigation. I'm not quite ready to sink $300 or more dollars into a Garmin. My
Smartphone has changed my life. On my trip back from Grand Rapids
self-navigation became a breeze rather than the laborious torture of other
trips. The constant stopping, getting my eyes adjusted to tiny map print, then
sometimes ultimately taking the wrong direction. Boom: Google pops me thru
towns. BUT: now there are problems of keeping the device juiced. My reliance on
it is paramount to getting home or getting anywhere.

I’m concerned about cellphone coverage and getting a signal in the far
northern reaches and in between places of the Scottish highlands.

On my road trip to Maine we also stopped at the L.L. Bean flagship store in
Freeport. Let me say right now that the outlet store is a rip off. It was
busloads of tourists looking (like me) for a deal, but walking away merely with
anything branded with Bean. All the rain pants I looked at were close to $200.
No bargain. So I went across the street to the Bean mega-complex to their
specific Bike, Ski, and Paddle store. Not department, but each activity has its
own store. Bean has a pretty big retail footprint in Freeport. But there I
found Showerspass rain pants in my size for a less than website price.
Affordable. Still as I ran my fingers over them trying to decide because it was
still a lot of money--aren't these just nylon? Yes, but waterproof and
breathable I tried to tell myself. Also England rains a lot I heard in my other
ear. So I bought them.

There and back we camped in New York state where on the 4th of
July weekend in Owego, NY we caught a live community orchestra accompanying a
fireworks show all in sync. A slice of hometown Americana.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Summer is half over. I know hard to believe. But the 4th of July
signals that we are past the solstice of the longest day and once again moving
toward shorter days.
A list poem is a combination of haiku and the prosaic list. It is an
itemization but also creative way of looking at something.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Or something like that. We can all contribute our voice,
become one of MANY voices that make a generation distinct.

Are you familiar with the term Millennial? It makes me
laugh. People get labeled without ever getting a vote—is this how you want to
be referred to? Gen Xer. Baby Boomer, Lost Generation.

The group of young people disillusioned after a horrific
World War (I!—often called The Great War, because they had no idea there would
have to be TWO of them) decided to drink gin, hang out in cafes, and write “modern”
stories. Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound (though to be honest, he was part
of another generation—the super crazy), HD, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—to name
a few of the “lost” souls.

And the British poet Stephen Spender.

I was introduced to his work by Marilyn Nelson who recently
gave the Zena Sutherland Lecture at the Harold Washington Library. He was a
poet whose writing spanned several great and ungreat wars, dozens of love
affairs and liaisons, and upheaval. It seems he knew the questions and didn’t
propose any answers. He was a voice of that time.

Millennials are also referred to as the Harry Potter
generation which makes them sound so cute—but who is envious of a generation
stuck with student loan debt, lack of job security, falling wages, and rising
sea levels. They are basically screwed (by the Baby Boomers—and the GREATEST
Generation—who pretty much sent planet Earth to hell in a handbasket). They are
writing and creating under a tremendous burden, beneath the dark shadows of an
impending apocalypse.

I plan to write more later about Spender and his poems about
his parents, about waiting in Railway Halls, about Berlin, about his friends.

Sometimes all we can do is record the NOW, use the present
in order to preserve the past.

Write now write. What is happening now in your life (albeit
a boring one) but one of significance. Add your voice by flashing a flash
memoir of the here and now. Write the hard things.

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eBook Edition Has bonus Material

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Quick Bio

Jane Hertenstein is the author of Home is Where We Live: Life at a Shelter Through a Young Girl’s Eyes (picture book), Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (with Marie James), and Beyond Paradise (YA fiction). See BOOKS
She has taught mini courses in memoir at the university level as well as seminars at Cornerstone Festival, Prairie School of Writing. Jane is listed on the Illinois Artists Roster. Roster Artists are certified by the Illinois Arts Council to work in public schools introducing young people to the arts. She lives in Chicago where she facilitates a “happening” critique group.